She Said: The ‘invisible hand’ of government an important part of our daily lives

By Amy Sandberg

In order to answer the question “What role should government play in our daily lives?” we must understand why we have a government in the first place.

Democracy is founded on a principle known as the “social contract” in which individuals collectively agree to sacrifice certain freedoms in exchange for the government providing basic services we couldn’t afford to pay for ourselves, security, and political stability.

We also need to address whether government is good or bad. Ronald Reagan said, “The government is not the solution, it is the problem.” His throwaway line (I assume it was throw away because it never stopped Reagan from drawing a government salary or pension) has been the conservative rallying cry ever since.

I agree that government can indeed overreach at times. Our budget is bloated and our deficit does need reeling in. Perhaps it has become part of the problem. However, I do not agree that the government is THE problem.

Economists talk about the “invisible hand” of the free market. There is also an “invisible hand” of government. This invisible hand balances out the invisible hand of the free market, which is ultimately self-serving and really only looks out for the interests of the individual. There’s a collective interest that the free market does not look out for. Big business has absolutely no interest in not doing business in the most polluting way with the closest thing they can get to slave labor. To rein in their short-term-quarterly-report-profit-maximizing interests, the rest of us have to band together as a group. This group of regular people is called “government.” As a group we pay taxes so that our homes don’t burn down during a wild fire, and our water is drinkable, our bank deposits are secure, and our buildings don’t collapse in an earthquake. Proof that government is doing its job is not when something good happens, but when nothing bad happens.

While researching this column, I came across a particularly instructive article. It identifies some of the ways that government improves a person’s life during a 24-hour period. If you’re interested, you can go to https://governmentisgood.com/ articles.php?aid=1&print=1 .

I imagine my conservative friends will read the article and argue that we can live without many of the services the article mentions. And they’d be right; we could live without, for instance, gender and race discrimination laws, and child care tax credits. In the same vein, the home I drove by last weekend with three matching Mercedes Benzes in its driveway could probably get by with one or none. But we are a rich country and we afford ourselves certain “luxuries.”

In a representative government, the role of citizens is to inform our elected officials what we think the government’s priorities should be. Victorious politicians and/or political parties often refer to this as a mandate. Once we provide this broad outline, we should let our representatives and the experts sort out the rest — that is after all why they get employer-paid health insurance, is it not?

What do I think the role of government should be in our daily lives? My broad outline would include the following: national defense, education, public assistance for the needy, public health, fire and disaster protection, transportation maintenance and regulation, funding of large scale scientific research and development, law enforcement, criminal justice, banking and currency regulation, aiding our foreign allies, preservation of the environment and other natural resources, protection of our civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution, consumer protection, building out and maintaining the nation’s infrastructure, and, yes, universal health care.

To them devils in Washington belong the details.